Ashes, ashes
by SILENTSANCTUARY
Summary: “People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.” AXEL, KAIRI, ROXAS


Three things Axel keeps in his pockets at all times are: two lighters, a set of matches and a pack of cigarettes – preferably Marlboro Gold even though they were more expensive than the cheaper brand that was sold at the convenience store. He keeps two separate lighters for his two favorite pastimes: smoking and lighting old buildings on fire. These days this was what he usually did other than hitting on good looking women [preferably blonds] and getting drunk [and kicked out] at the bar. To sum up everything he was in one word, he was basically a **loser. **He had no place to call his own, made more enemies than friends and couldn't even keep up a relationship for very long before getting bored. He crashed at Roxas's place. He annoyed Kairi at a daily basis. He pissed the _Organization _by purposely slacking off.

He doesn't remember when his lawless lifestyle had begun; maybe it had always been that way. His mother worked in-between jobs – the kind of jobs that wouldn't garner much respect from others, because the people who took these kinds of jobs were easily replaceable. She cleaned hotels by day and worked as a waitress by night. His father was often out of work because he lacked the spirit or the motivation to find a decent job. Instead, he spent days in the living room, abusing drugs and using the college money his mother had painstakingly saved, to buy them.

It wasn't long before he began to fall into his father's ways – even after he died because of a drug overdose when he was just a teenager. He skipped school, had sex and smoked pack after pack of cigarettes until his throat felt clogged and his vision grew blurry. He cavorted downtown, made short business of producing fake ids to get into clubs and bars and drank ghastly amounts of alcohol. When he actually _did _return home, it was through handcuffs.

And his mother wept.

It didn't come as a surprise when she killed herself in a bloody suicide. He supposed he knew it was coming, because when the day really did arrive, he had simply walked into the kitchen to the sight of his mother sprawled across the linoleum floor, wrists slashed open from a razor blade. He didn't scream nor did call for help. He only looked at her lifeless body, marveling how her blood ran in little rivers down the cracks in the flooring.

On the table there had been an envelope with a note inside it, but he never got around to reading it. He packed his few belongings into a duffel bag and left home, his footprints tracking red on the floor from stepping into the pool of his mother's blood.

He got into the _Organization,_ a group of no-good criminals when he was eighteen. It was fun for a while, getting paid for simple tasks like drug trafficking and producing fake ids [which he already did anyways] until the jobs quickly outgrew petty and turned serious. As he rose within the ranks of the _Organization,_ the number of assassinations he had to undertake grew. It started with the traitors, then rival gang members and soon advanced to killing rich men for their money.

Now this lifestyle had become irreversible. Everyone knows the penalty for betrayal in the Organization, and although he had tempted his superiors, he hadn't come close to the punishment -- yet. He doubts that he could manage his own life even if he did find a way out of the Organization -- his criminal record was just buried too steep for any respectable business to hire him. He was stuck in this crap-hole and this time, there was no way out.

Sometimes when he's around Kairi or Roxas, life gets a little bit better, but on other days, he's just living the life of a modern anti-hero, desperately searching for some way out of his predicament.

But as they say: desperate men would do desperate things.

And he was certainly one of them.

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On one particular day, Axel woke up to the sound of police sirens and dimly thought that the cops were after him again. Getting up from the bed, he realized that the sirens were coming from outside, but they weren't after him. It was just another car chase – probably the result of some hit and run accident. Sharply pulling down the curtains to make the room dark again, he returned to his bed intending to catch another few minutes of sleep before he decided to wake up, only to see someone was sleeping under his sheets. He didn't recognize her until she rolled over to her side, exposing her red hair for him to see.

How could he have forgotten? Last night had been one of those other nights – getting drunk before heading off to bed where several hours of bliss unfolded until they grew weary and fell asleep in each other's arms. To Axel, the touch of a woman was familiar to him as alcohol, but things were always different with Kairi. She had always been different from the others –

He bent over her, brushing red locks of hair from her sleeping face to expose her neckline. She groggily lifted her arms to his face where her fingers passed the teardrop tattoos below his eyes. He breathed into her ear, making sure that every word he spoke was articulate as the thoughts running through his mind.

"Goodbye."

She dropped her hands to her side as if they were stung. She who was in a half-sleep didn't fully understand the meaning of his words; maybe, she was thinking that he meant he was going off to "work." How sadly misunderstood was she in her slumber. Had she been awake, she would have broken-hearted at his cold words.

He would have liked to stay a while. Maybe if he lingered long enough, he and Kairi could actually make it to the future together. But the thoughts of having her as a girlfriend – more or less as a wife, revolted him. If she stayed with him, he would make life unbearable for her. He knew it.

She deserved so much better. He thought this when he put on his clothes. He thought this when he tucked the covers tighter across her body, lightly grazing her cheek with his lips as he did.

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He wandered around the city for a while, shivering and cursing the early morning fog. Even though he had a hoodie on, it was still cold as fuck. To express his feelings, he broke into a liquor store and made off with a couple of whiskey bottles and some cash, laughing wildly when the alarms went off. The bars were closed and Roxas would kill him if he woke him up at this hour, so he took a bus all the way to the outskirts of the city where he got off. Here, there was a cluster of old buildings and abandoned homes that had been forgotten long ago by society. This part of the city was considered the suburbs, which was mostly empty except for some homeless people who set up shelter here.

He hung around one of the old, crumbling buildings, opening bottle after bottle of whiskey and chugging the contents all down as if he was thirst-ravaged. Pretty soon, he was drunk – too drunk to care or to think about the worries of the world. Setting down his second empty bottle, he allowed it to roll across the dirt floor, before he opened another one. This time, instead of drinking the whiskey, he poured it across a nest of old newspapers in front of him. The alcohol turned the wasting paper brown and soaked into the ground below it, creating a muddy mess. He laughed.

He reached into his pocket and took out his lighter and his matches. It took some time to light one on fire because of his disorientation, but when he finally got one lit, he held it precariously over the wet wad of papers. Almost immediately, the wind caught hold of the flame and extinguished it, before it even touched the newspaper.

He lit another one and the same thing happened. He cursed in an admirable slur before trying once again – this time blocking the wind from reaching the flame with his palm.

The newspaper caught on fire in a shower of red sparks, causing in to stumble back. In a matter of seconds, it had exhausted its fuel and jumped to other available sources. The flames hungrily licked the paperthin walls, the candy wrappers – strengthened by the alcohol he had poured across the ground. He sat in the middle of the display of fireworks, mesmerized and oddly jubilant.

The flames had consumed the entire room now. It blocked every possible exit, filling the room with smoke and ashes. He jumped to his feet now, dancing across the little fires on the ground that grabbed onto the fabric of his pants and hoodie. He laughed and laughed and laughed until his lungs gave out and he started coughing on account of the smoke and fire.

A ditty, a rhyme used to amuse little children rose unbidden to his still drunken lips but he never got around to saying it. It died on his tongue, shriveled up, half-remembered in his mind.

"_Ring around a rosy,  
Pockets full of posies.  
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down."_

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The fire that started in that forgotten, broken building spread across the suburbs, filling the air with ashes and smoke that mingled with the morning fog. Early in the morning, people who had taken shelter in the suburbs were forced out of the buildings, having no choice but to stand outside and watch helplessly as their homes were destroyed a second or third time. Sounds of sirens and people screaming filled the heavy air, thrusting the city into half-chaos. News bulletins flashed across the screens of a thousand televisions, alerting others of what had happened and what they should be aware of.

Any traces of a man named Axel had vanished in the flames that consumed the suburbs. The whiskey bottles had melted in the blaze and his body had turned to ashes. When investigators inspected the area later for any kind of evidence that might have caused the fire, the only thing left of him that they found was his half-melted lighter case.

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Kairi woke up at precisely 11:59 PM – about four hours since Axel had left the apartment. Her hand dropped involuntarily to the other side of the bed searching for a warm body to hold, but it found nothing. She sharply rose from her covers. Blue-violet eyes searched the room for any signs of his presence but found nothing. He was gone.

She drew the covers tightly against her naked form, staring at the window before her – as if she was expecting him to materialize any second in one of his little games of "hide and go seek" – or rather "hide and scare the living crap out of Kairi."

When she finally got up, it was to call Roxas. It turned out he was still sleeping, because he had spent the entire night playing video games, so he wasn't too happy that she woke him up – especially on a matter concerning _Axel._

"Axel?" Kairi imagined Roxas scratching the side of his head in half-puzzlement. "No I haven't seen him. What are you worried about Kairi? He's probably jacking off downtown – or well, don't know – whatever crazy shit he does."

"I know," she spoke into the receiver, transferring it to her shoulder as she slipped on her clothes. "Hopefully he'll come back soon. Although he annoys the crap out of me sometimes, I can't imagine life without him."

"Well I can," Roxas snorted. "Guys like him – they come several times during your life. People call them douchebags or douchefags. But yeah, I get what you mean. Can't imagine life without him waking me up at god-abnormal parts in the morning, telling me that he's gonna crash at my place –"


End file.
